Ross Farm Museum

Geese on the Pond...
Rose Cottage where today they were baking biscuits and cookies and making butter. Wild Thing was afraid of the steep stairs and Nature Girl wants to move in!
Wild Thing of course spent loads of time with the chickens.
The pigs are our hands down favourite animals there though. They play like dogs, they like getting petted and tickled behind the eyes and scratched on the back. They answer you when you talk to them. Look at that face.

We had such a good time we got a year pass. Every weekend through the winter they fun events, and snowshoe and x country ski trails and no tourists clogging up the joint! They have special programs where kids get to go and in period dress learn everything about farming in the mid 1800's. Next year we'll sign Nature Girl up, she is so excited!

A little update...

Picasa sits there spinning and spinning every time I try to post pictures. But life goes on even without photos.

Wild Thing is very involved in writing things right now. He is making comic books that combine Bionicles (he has none here, he just likes them and had us print out pictures of them which he coloured and cut out and carries around in a shoebox) with knights and pirates. He is making birthday cards (addressed to himself) and asking for letters every day.

Nature Girl is working on exercising her arm - which is still out of shape and inflexible but 70% healed. SHe visits the ortho in 3 more weeks but in the meantime I will be taking her to see the osteopath. It is CREEPY that she can't straighten her arm or bend it. It gets better each day, but still, it looks creepy and wrong.

She has been INITIATING lots of math stuff with the help of a library book that I believe to be worth its weight in gold - but I can't find even second hand right now! Called "Math for Fun Projects" The library will let me keep it til someone else puts a hold on it (Thank you lovely librarians who also homeschool!).

She spends most of her quiet time reading. She's rereading Sewell's Black Beauty right now.

We discovered the greatest series called "Our Canadian Girl" Twelve female protagonists, all 10-13 years old, from across Canada and spanning from the 16oo's to the 1950's. We read the first two books about a New England Planter girl who moves to our area following the Acadian expulsion and befriends an Acadian girl her age who remains a prisoner, though who's family is allowed to stay to work on maintaining the dykes.. We just finished the first in a series of four about a little girl from a south shore fishing village during WWII. She is loving these and they have opened up tons of discussions around the dinner table. Darkmirror studied the Acadian Expulsion in History class this fall as well (they're finishing up WWI right now). Our Canadian Girl has a website and we plan to visit it tomorrow.

Noggins Farm Corn Maze

First you take your flag, in case you get lost in the maze and they need to "extract you". Wild Thing insisted on a red flag.

The map of the maze and the observation platform for those who want to watch.

Nature Girl mapping her way through the maze. She was ruthlessly efficient. Ruthless I say!

Papa Pan worrying we're going to be stuck feeding cranky napless Sprout cow corn for dinner. Never fear I found a huge crop of chickweed to tide him over.

Apple Picking at Noggins

No horse drawn wagon this time, this is a big commercial orchard they have tractors!

No one minded the lack of horses (they do have miniature horses when we get back).

We're almost at the orchard!!!!

Taste testing the rare Kestral apple (unless you live in Nova Scotia you've probably never tried one - they are delicious but don't keep well for export. Apples straight from the orchard are completely unlike anything you've ever bought in the store).

Simple Machines - The Incline Plane

The slide fanatics think these are wicked.

RAces - more mass means Nature Girl won every time.

Papa Pan was nervous about letting Sprout go on his own until I reminded him about that mass thing, and the fact that the leading cause of toddlers breaking their legs is silly adults taking them down the slide in their laps because "it is safer". He slide down SO slowly it was really funny.

There was a tantrum when it was time to leave, less napping, more sliding!

Simple Machines at Noggin's Farm

The pumping game uses levers and an incline plane to make ... FUN!

More pumping less duckie hoarding!

Nothing better than starting an afternoon outside in really cold weather, than by getting really wet.

Okay you three, enough of these boring science demonstrations, lets go eat some apples!

Making Pan Pipes STEP TWO

Papa Pan and Nature Girl learning about pitch and panpipes.

Make notes about the different notes you want to make and approximate lengths to cut pipes.

Papa Pan helps Nature Girl with cutting because she only has one arm.

Next they experimented with drying them in the oven.